The researchers said enough clinical evidence now supports mental health professionals recommending light therapy as a treatment for depression. A few participants were instead given placebo pills and placebo devices.
Advertisement
“The combination of light and an antidepressant seems to work very well for treating nonseasonal depression”, said study leader Dr. Raymond Lam, a professor and head of the Mood and Anxiety Disorders Program at the University of British Columbia in Canada.
Patients either received light monotherapy 30 minutes per day with a placebo pill; a placebo light box for 30 minutes per day with 20 mg of the antidepressant fluoxetine hydrochloride; combination light therapy and 20 mg of fluoxetine; or a placebo light box with a placebo pill.
He added that researchers were surprised by just how effective the combination treatment proved to be. About 60 per cent of study participants using both light therapy and an anti-depressant were nearly back to normal, compared to about 45 per cent using light therapy alone, and 30 per cent of participants who received the placebo. The last group had a combination of both placebo light therapy and placebo antidepressants.
Light therapy alone was better than placebo, but not from a statistically significant point of view, Lam said.
Co-author Dr. Anthony Levitt, a psychiatrist at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto, says that adding light therapy to antidepressant medication reduced patients’ symptoms much more quickly. “The greatest reduction is in the first one to two weeks – that’s true of all antidepressant trials – but improvement continued even up until eight weeks”.
Light therapy has always been used to treat SAD, but its effects in patients with non-seasonal depression were not well-known. “The season in which (patients) were treated made no difference to the outcome”. Most people typically receive medication and psychotherapy – but medications don’t work in all cases and there’s a shortage of providers in many areas.
“It’s important to find new treatments because our current therapies don’t work for everyone”.
Although more studies need to be done to confirm the trial’s results, Lam said the findings are important for patients who don’t respond well to anti-depressants.
Since bright light treatment is used for people whose seasonal depression occurs in the darker months, the researchers hypothesized it might also lift depression that isn’t brought on by light deprivation.
Light boxes are sold at drugstores and other locations, Lam said, for less than $100 to $300.
Advertisement
“It still should be prescribed by a physician”, Levitt said.
